April 30, 2024
An interview with Wendy Chen, whose powerful, lyrical debut, Their Divine Fires is about history, love, passion, loyalty, betrayal, and our desire to be free of our past.
April 22, 2024
Seven questions for Kim Hye-Jin, whose novel, Counsel Culture (Restless Books, 2024), is about a woman’s scapegoating and her path to redemption.
April 15, 2024
December 12, 2023
Taking all the buses of Buenos Aires, a writer on a mission makes the city his own.
Buenos Aires is many things, including a city for walking, snapping photographs, and writing poetry in notebooks while nibbling a medialuna in a coffee shop. Porteña writer Cecilia Pavón lets us peek into her notebooks as she wonders, Why can’t life be just drinking coffee and writing in notebooks with soft covers?
“Seasons don’t exist anymore, they declare, complain, it’s all come undone. Blame Derrida. And then comes the rain and the cold. And that’s what really gets you, they’re the worst.”
“The manual couldn’t be clearer about how even moisture / trapped in sugar could ruin the melangeur, / so when the granite wheels screech and some unseen / plastic insert breaks, you anger, but decide not to let // an inattention so small dictate how you should love,” from “Melangeur,” by Mihaela Moscaliuc
“n the free circulation of commodities, there is no center or edge. We are all part of the same untraceable sludge,” from “Dead Horse Bay,” by Santiago Acosta (trans. by Tiffany Troy & The Women in Translation Project)
“Grief sits in the bottom of my lungs — / maybe I cradle it there so I can breathe / every spore, every whiff of a slivering / land and an unfurling chest — / so I can say I have lived through the worst / of the fires,” from “The Air Has Changed,” by Rina Garcia Chua
End of Maneuvers
“I’d never gone into the cemetery by bicycle. I’d always gone around—it didn’t seem right to use its streets as a shortcut. But it wasn’t really a shortcut, more a passage into another dimension.”
Today Is Yesterday
“Recently arrived in Buenos Aires—not a city but a dangerous miracle, buzzing with electricity like a tract of unequal promises—I lived alone, and on summer nights I liked to sleep on the floor, the window open, watching bad movies on channel 13 past midnight.”
A New Dawn
It’s 2050, and five African nations have surrendered their sovereignty to form a new nation. Alande Mukumbi, the new president of Embo, is determined to prove the naysayers wrong.
Each November, Buenos Aires’s Pride march proceeds down a ten-block stretch that is the “spine of Argentine history,” fulfilling Eva Perón’s famous prediction: “I shall return, and I shall be multitudes.”
Against increasing calls to “cancel” Dostoevsky due to the Russian nationalism espoused in his writings, Ani Kokobobo chooses to hold on to a Dostoevsky of the margins, a Dostoevsky who tests us ethically when we rationalize horrible means to justify an imagined greater good.
Photographer Yousef Khanfar recalls his time with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in this tribute to the first female justice of the United States Supreme Court.
7 Questions for Sébastien Delot
Seven questions for Sébastien Delot, curator of the exhibit Etel Adnan, Between East and West (February 1–June 30, 2024) at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) in Saudi Arabia.
A Griot of the Black German Experience: A Conversation with Katharina Oguntoye
Karlos K. Hill interviews Katharina Oguntoye, a renowned Black German educator, activist, and community leader, as part of his ongoing column Bearing Witness, which highlights the efforts of cultural figures doing works of essential good around issues of social justice.
8 Questions for Isabel Zapata
Eight questions for (and eight answers from) Isabel Zapata, in whose new collection, A Whale is a Country, animals are concrete, fully drawn fellow beings, and we are invited to see them in new ways.
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